Yeah, Slashdot's the absolute worst. Extremely active, all posts on one page until a thread reaches an insane number of responses (300? 500? I forget), a "karma"/thread-viewing-options system so confusing you practically have to have a Ph.D. in computer science to even comprehend it, on and on. It doesn't help that the "karma" system allows thousands of morons to turn the system into their personal playground, on the argument that "Hey, you can always set your karma cutoff level higher if you don't want to read our crap!"; it causes threads that would have 150 intelligent responses to have 600 posts instead.
I've largely given up on even reading Slashdot for these reasons. Luckily, some guy has created AlterSlash, a site that's basically a "Best-of" digest. It lists the new threads and only the hand-picked best posts from those threads. It's a million times better.